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Published online 23 October 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1039
News: Q&A
Making a cellular menagerie
Molecular biologist Caroline Kane talks about a new image library of the cell.
A US$2.5-million stimulus grant has been awarded to the American Society for Cell Biology in Bethesda, Maryland, to establish an online open-access database called 'The Cell: An Image Library'. The society is using the money to hire eight part-time annotators, who will help to compile images and videos for the site.
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This is awesome news! I remember when Rachel Fink and the Society for Developmental Biology made the videotape called A DOZEN EGGS about 18 years ago, featuring time-lapse movies of embryonic development of the sea urchin, worms, fruit flies, etc. I always envied the guys like Th. Boveri and Edmund Beecher Wilson who could wile away the hours peering at cells and embryos under the microscope before the frenzied era of grant writing and other distractions. What these guys could divine about biology from watching cells hour after hour was incredible--compared to the billions we spend today on technologies that only incrementally add to our understanding! The Irish poet once remarked that "Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire." Perhaps this resource will allow a new generation of thinkers to experience the simple wonders under the microscope that shaped people like Boveri and Wilson a hundred years ago, and LIGHT THEIR FIRES!